Murder at the MDH
by Jason Layton
Summary: Normal straight up SH/JW case More Dental Crud! Please Please Please Review
1. Prologue

She was lying on her side facing the wall, with her head forced upwards at right angles, horizontal to the lift doors on which it rested. The first thing the security guard thought was she was a tramp, brought to the car park vestibule by the cold night outside. You got them sometimes, in the main levels after the Dental Hospital had closed, lighting fires and generally making a nuisance of themselves. It was 3am, and he barely registered how she might have got into the stairwell as he unlocked the glass door to move her on. When he got close however, the pooling blood around her became evident, and as he bent down to check for a pulse, her body and head parted company, confirming her earlier demise.

By 6am the police had closed off the whole Brook Street Car Park, and by finding her still full wallet confirmed she was no tramp. In fact so well did the initial investigation progress, the Dental Nurse Cadets arriving an hour later already knew that one of their number had left them forever.

An attractive young female constable, asking them whether they had been on site the night before accosted the hung over final year students arriving at 9am. Blotted minds which 10 minutes earlier had been preparing for an exciting minor oral surgery, MOS day, where now forced to remember a half forgotten drunken cut through. A midnight attempted raid on the Lancashire Eccles Cake factory, followed by a run through the Manchester Dental Hospital site, while being forever drawn towards the beacon like tower of the Moss Side Lane Lager factory.

The news reported her death, followed by interviews with distraught friends and parents for a few days. Attractive 18-year-old blonde corpses even make the news in Manchester. The police followed a number of leads, the ex-boyfriend, the step fathers exotic film collection, reports of a cyber stalker, all with no conclusion. Eventually detectives started to look into the unusual position of the body, the locked vestibule doors, an attempted robbery, but the trail was cold and no one seemed to get anywhere.

Eventually the MDH returned to its normal steady beat, the constables wrote up their statements, and the whole incident was filed and forgotten. The final year students began cutting through the site at night again, a new cadet was found, and she began to fade from the minds of her friends and acquaintances, her room in the shared house was let by someone else, she began to disappear,

That was for everyone but the mother, bereft without her eldest child, she tried to fill the long and treacherous nights by searching the Internet for someone who could help her. That's when she found the website, The Science of Deduction, which is when she emailed Sherlock Holmes.


	2. Domestic matters

Holmes had been very bored, frighteningly bored, worryingly bored, and the wall had taken the brunt. John had been willing something to happen for days; usually it was Sherlock haunting St Bart's mortuary like some blood obsessed spectre. Recently it had been John, willing Lestrade or Molly to find something exciting, some mysterious case to occupy his friends mind, before he managed to damage anyone else's property.

So when he returned to the flat later than usual, dragging a Tesco bag for life filled with the essentials of life, it was to find an absorbed Holmes. A Holmes with the zeal of the chase on his face, in short the Holmes he was obsessed with. He didn't look up when John entered the room, just kept reading, what John suddenly realized was his own, laptop screen. John offered him a cup of tea, and received a halfhearted grunt in reply. In the next hour, the tea magically appeared, Sherlock drank it, then a pasta dish magically appeared, Sherlock didn't deem to eat it, then another cup of tea arrived, it went cold, Sherlock drank it. All this time he read the case notes of Nicola Hogg, the Dental Cadet in the Stairwell.

Sherlock read the brief case notes, acquired then e-mailed to him by Mycroft, MEN articles online, the original police reports, and finally re-read the email from Mrs O'Callaghan, Nicola's mother.

Normally this might have been an open and shut case, someone at the MDH killed her, dumped the body, but like the Police Sherlock couldn't see the answer.

_John how do I get to Manchester?_

John looked up from the evening paper he was vaguely reading, and gave a brief synopsis of Virgin West Coast, or M1/ M6. Then went back to his paper, he wearily looked up when Sherlock walked out of the room, he looked up again when ten minutes later Sherlock came back lugging his black hold-all.

_We're going to Manchester then?_ John asked wearily

_Only if you're ready?_

Sherlock, I've been ready since I came in this afternoon, and saw you reading the Manchester Evening News.

The train was comfortable, and light in normal circumstances John would have liked the journey, but 2 hours of a silent Sherlock, and his mind was wandering. He suddenly looked up

_Where will we stay?_

_Mrs O'Callaghan will put us up, somewhere called Fallowfields, I've told her to pick us up from Piccadilly._

Everytime John thought he'd got close to thinking like Sherlock, he did one of these amazing terrifying and odd things, and John realized he was still Sherlock's puppy.


End file.
